True Repentance and the Prodigal Son

We’re on part two of a lesson about true repentance for our midweek program. For our kids, we’ve defined repentance as:

Last week, we had some puppet visitors come in to talk about repenting of both bad behavior (disobedience) and good behavior (when we’re being prideful).

This week, we’ll take a look at Luke 15 and discuss the personalities and actions of the two sons. To introduce the story in Large Group, I plan on showing this short video:

Then, as a group, we’ll fill in thought bubbles, first for the younger son (Prodigal) and then for the older son, based on what we guess they might have been thinking. We’ll talk about where each son needed repentance – either for his disobedience or his pride.

Help Him Find His Way Home (Real Life Maze)

Inspired by this maze over at Danielle’s Place , I thought it would be fun to take the older kids on a journey with the prodigal son. Perhaps you could write clues to take them around the church and finally “home” again or perhaps you could blindfold them and have them go through an obstacle course. The younger son wasn’t totally lost, but had ended up going the wrong way in his life and needed to find his way home.

Prodigal Son Relay Race

This game is part of the Bible Fun for Kids post above as well. Kids are each assigned a task in the story (spend all the money, feed all the pigs, put a new robe on, etc) and hurry through the story as a relay race. Find the details here.